Released on May 13 in France, this horrific film has established itself as one of the surprise successes of the year. Behind its tale of love’s curse, the film explores profoundly contemporary anxieties.
Since its theatrical release on May 13 in France and May 15 in the United States, Obsessionthe first feature film by American director Curry Barker continues to get people talking. At first glance, the film advances masked under the trappings of a classic horror fable. Bear, a shy young man unable to confess his feelings to his best friend Nikki, resorts to a magical gadget to obtain what reality refuses him: to be loved in return. But if his wish initially seems to have been granted, the story quickly gives a glimpse of the excesses of a love obtained artificially.
The starting point evokes these moral tales where each fulfilled desire carries in substance its price to pay. However, the film quickly takes another direction. At only 26 years old, Barker captures, in his first feature film, not the dangers of excessive love but the fears that haunt Gen Z.
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A romance that turns into a nightmare
Because when the wish takes effect, Nikki does not simply transform into an obsessive lover. She fades away. Something within her gradually withdraws from the world. Her free will, her desires, her even capacity to inhabit her own body seem to be torn from her piece by piece. The bursts of violence and the horrific manifestations that fuel the story are in reality only the symptoms of this erasure. They reveal the confinement of a woman prisoner of a version of herself shaped by another.
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This is where the film finds its most disturbing dimension. The real curse is not the spell, but the desire that made it possible. Bear does not seek to be loved so much as to neutralize the possibility of refusal. However, on several occasions, the film reveals the truth to him. Nikki is a prisoner in her own body, aware of what she is going through and desperate at not being able to escape it.
Every time an opportunity to free her presents itself, Bear looks away. Even more disturbing, he perceives his distress as a personal injury. When she begs him to end the spell, he does not hear her cry for help, but a questioning of his own value. “Is it so terrible for her to be with me?” By denying Nikki the freedom to choose, he ends up confusing love with possession. So many elements that we find in toxic relationships.
The mirror of a generation
What makes Obsession Particularly captivating is its ability to resonate with the anxieties of the time regarding relationships. A time when many young men, often isolated behind their screens, seem to experience growing loneliness and an exacerbated fear of rejection, while many young women express a growing feeling of insecurity.
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The film appears to come at a time when Generation Z is examining romantic relationships with almost clinical precision. Under the influence of social networks, sentimental dynamics have become an object of constant analysis. We dissect notions like “love bombing”, emotional dependence, emotional limits and even consent with an intensity that would undoubtedly have seemed foreign to previous generations.
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Very real fears
Curry Barker, 26, himself belongs to this new generation. Before cinema, he made himself known on YouTube with the channel That’s a Bad Idea, where he makes short films (mainly comedic), which has more than a million subscribers. A journey which may seem far from horror but which the director considers to be perfectly coherent. In the podcast Seen on the Screenhe explains that comedy and horror are based on the same observation of human behavior. Understanding what makes the public laugh, understanding what scares them, requires, according to him, to enter into their psychology. His short films therefore constituted a natural path towards horror cinema.
However, this intimate knowledge of the concerns of his generation shines through in his outlook. Barker uses the register of horror to transform into raw material what his generation experiences on a daily basis: the permanent analysis of human relationships. An awkward conversation between friends, a notification on a phone, an insistent look during an evening or the uncomfortable silence of a couple in the middle of a group become sources of anxiety here.
What finally strikes Obsessionit is less his fantastic device than the precision with which he transforms ordinary anxieties into nightmare material. For a first feature film, Curry Barker shows astonishing maturity, finding in the relational fears of his time a more effective source of horror than any monster or other chainsaw killer.
